Given its remaining schedule, the football Hawkeyes could go undefeated this season. What do they need to do to avoid a letdown?
By Ryan Rodriguez
At 7-0 and coming off of a recuperating bye week, the Hawkeye football team has a real shot at going undefeated for the first time since 1922.
Iowa’s remaining opponents have gone a combined 2-15 in Big Ten play this year, and on paper look vastly inferior to how the Hawkeyes have stacked up this year. Every game is winnable, but if history is any indicator, the gap between winnable in theory and winnable in practice can get pretty big.
With that in mind, it raises the question: Is every game on Iowa’s remaining schedule a trap game?
“Right now we still have 42 percent of our season left and close to 63 percent of our Big Ten season left in terms of scheduling. So there’s a lot of football left,” head coach Kirk Ferentz said. “As much as everybody wants to think they know what’s going to happen or what should happen, football is pretty unpredictable.”
Unpredictable is an understatement and one Ferentz and Iowa fans were all too familiar with just a few years ago.
The 2009 Hawkeyes, one of the most celebrated squads in program history, came out of the gate blazing to win its first nine games of the season before losing at home to an unranked Northwestern team, 17-10, in Week 10.
So how do New Kirk and this edition of the Hawks avoid the mistakes their predecessors made?
“There’s so much more that we want to do that we just have to keep looking ahead,” quarterback C.J. Beathard said. “There are still five games left in the regular season — that’s a lot. We’ve won all seven so far, which is a great accomplishment for us, but we’re not done.”
Iowa’s path to 12-0 is easier than six years ago. That 2009 squad had to circle the wagons after the loss to Northwestern and go on the road to play 11th-ranked Ohio State in Ohio Stadium.
This time around, Iowa has Maryland, Indiana, Minnesota, Purdue, and Nebraska left, none of which are ranked. They have combined for just two conference wins.
What’s more, each of those teams ranks near the bottom of the Big Ten in terms of total offense, total defense, or both. Iowa, on the other hand, is fourth in each category.
Every matchup is winnable, but given how hard it is to run the table and go 12-0 in modern college football, the idea of Iowa having a catastrophic breakdown and dropping a game, even against one of those vastly inferior teams, isn’t all that outlandish.
So far, whatever Iowa has done has worked. Through injuries and adversity — which were largely absent in 2009 — the team has looked stable and in control for nearly every quarter this season.
Maintaining that attitude and mentality is the best way to ensure the team’s success.
“The next game is all we care about,” tight end Henry Krieger Coble said. “With the bye, you kind of have a chance to sit back and think about all the other stuff a little bit, but as of this week, all we care about is beating Maryland.”
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